Stefan Wulff: Germany, Cycling, Currachs, Change,

Stefan2.jpg

Title

Stefan Wulff: Germany, Cycling, Currachs, Change,

Subject

Life History; Cork; Ireland; Germany;

Description

A detailed interview with German born Stefan Wulff. He gives a really rich account of building currachs, of trips down the Lee and his impressions of Cork from the river side.
Stefan was born in Dortmund, in the Ruhr Valley, Germany. He has one brother and one sister. He came to study in UCC in 1994.
The agricultural area where Stefan grew up was very spacious with plenty of fields to play in. He played the usual childhood games: cycling, football and a favourite which was shooting darts from an air rifle in their cellar. He had a passion for kite flying and bought hundreds over the years.
His earliest memory is of not wanting to go to pre-school and nun like figures who wanted to give him (calcium) tablets. He remembers his grandmother telling him stories particularly about his father growing up in Prussia and how during the war and they had to flee for their own safety and moved to northern Germany. His grandmother helped in the process of settling the large numbers of refugees. He was told his grandfather was shot, but Stefan later learned he had ended his own life.
Stefan first came with a cycling group in 1983. He came back in 1994 on a student exchange programme to UCC where he met his future wife.
Stefan mentions the differences in the social dimensions between Ireland and Germany. It took him years to settle in Ireland because of these differences.
He uses the words Lee, chaos and change to describe Cork. The river Lee holds a strong attraction for Stefan, and he speaks of it bringing a certain flair to Cork. The chaos comes from observing the lunacy of cork driving and parking habits. He talks about the change in Cork’s architecture and how dilapidated some buildings were when he first arrived.
Stefan highlights his discomfort with the drinking culture and how much more consumer orientated people are and how it has brought greed to some.
Naomhoige Chorcai and Meitheal Mara are rowing clubs that build and row currachs. Stefan describes the boats, getting them into the water and rowing them down the Lee. He gives a detailed description of viewing Cork from the river side and a long journey he took on the open sea, in an Aran currach, from Lettermullen in Connemara to Inishman with Padraig O’Dineen, one of the founders of Meitheal Mara, and Brian Hennessy.

Note; This interview was conducted as part of the Cork 2005 Project

Date

19 November 2004

Identifier

CFP_SR00345_wulff_2004

Coverage

Cork; Ireland; Germany: 1990s - 2000s;

Source

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

Language

English

Type

Sound

Format

1 .wav File

Interviewee

Interviewer

Duration

77m 53s

Location

Glanmire, Cork, Ireland

Original Format

MiniDisc

Bit Rate/Frequency

16bit / 44.1kHz

Transcription

The following is a short extract from the interview transcript, copyright of the Cork Folklore Project. If you wish to access further archival material please contact CFP, folklorearchive@gmail.com


M.O'D: When I say Cork are there, can you think of three words that come to mind, the first three things that jump to mind?

S.W: Lee, chaos, change.

M.O'D: Can you say a bit about those?

S.W: As I mentioned before the Lee always kind of stuck out, em well maybe not the Lee as being the Lee, and everything that’s linked to it for a Cork person, but just as a river flowing through a city and eh adding so much more flair to it; I suppose that might be debatable as regards to everything that goes into it, as well which one mightn’t want to think about too closely, but just as such I always really well that’s something, coming into Cork city, Patrick’s Bridge, and so on. It’s really doing something for me. Now chaos, I suppose the traffic I’m referring to. (I would have come to Ireland with a bicycle, again you know when I came over to Ireland I flew into Ireland, I had my bicycle with me, flying through Shannon, putting the bicycle onto the bus, and off we went to Cork, so I would have cycled for the first couple of years all over the place, and eh which was a great way of transport and I was grateful for having the bike, because I’ve heard that the traffic is lunacy here; obviously the whole infrastructure in Cork is was geared towards garages, small cars or whatever and em but then obviously the whole thing evolved traffic grew more and more cars on the streets, and just congestion all over the place, and on top of that, I suppose a typical, is it Irish or particularly Corkonian behaviour, to park everywhere you want, it doesn’t matter if you block the road, you already have a car parked on one side of the road, it doesn’t matter if you park on the other side of the road, and nobody else can get through. So that to some extent amused me, to another extent annoyed me, and em I suppose I would have been used to cycling a long, long time, and cycling probably in a haphazard way, myself, but it would have suited me down to the ground you know: I didn’t care whether I broke a red light, or just go against the stream, which I still do, which I think is very well to do, but obviously it’s getting a bit more dangerous now because things have improved ever so small I suppose. The surfaces in Cork city have improved luckily ten years down the road, that brings me on to change, the change that took place particularly over the past five years I think is just phenomenal, em I’m saying that in a very neutral way, so I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose it’s both. Remembering coming to Cork and yeah getting around in Cork ten years ago, there were certain areas where I thought this is unbelievable, this reminded me of em really probably the early times after the second World War in Germany em well that would be an exaggeration now obviously there would have been devastating destruction there, but em lets say the years after rebuilding Germany and so on, and you would have had really very poor architecture, very neglected areas and so on, and certainly one area that sticks in my mind would be the North Mall: that would have been extremely grey, a lot of dilapidated houses, em at the same time there was a nice flair in that area but really I felt grey, grey on a bad day it really could have an impact on somebody’s mood like, and certainly the Coal Quay similarly. So they were the things there was an attraction one side kind of a feeling of being appalled, how things could be that way, could be that bad in the 90’s, so that certainly had an impression on me.

Collection

Citation

Cork Folklore Project, “Stefan Wulff: Germany, Cycling, Currachs, Change,,” accessed March 28, 2024, https://corkfolklore.org/archivecatalolgue/document/32.